Paintings and Photographs by Maria Passarotti, Rotem Reshef, and Liane Ricci

Inaugural Exhibition June 8-28, 2006
Opening Reception Thursday, June 8, 5-9 p.m.
After the opening, please call for an appointment.

Photographer and painter Maria Passarotti uncovers beauty in the most mundane of scenes. Her most recent photographs are inspired by the intersection of nature and humanity. Dozens of empty trash cans strewn across an airy stretch of Jones Beach appear as elegant, upright characters on a stage; light from a pair of automobile headlights casts a saintly glow across a ground cover of fallen leaves; and a lush forested scene is surprisingly the edge of a college parking lot. Nearly always absent of people, Passarotti's photographs evoke a haunting human presence through details such as electrical wires, roads and hints of domestic life.

Israeli painter Rotem Reshef was born and raised near Tel Aviv, and graduated from Tel Aviv's Hamidrasha School of Art in 1988. Following graduation, the prestigious America-Israel Cultural Foundation awarded the artist a coveted Sharett Scholarship and featured her work with that of other scholarship recipients in an exhibition at the Ramat Gan Museum of Art. In 2001 the artist and her family moved to Amsterdam, where she received an international MA degree in Museology from the Reinwardt Academy in Amsterdam. In 2004, the artist and her family moved to New York City. Reshef's most recent paintings are large abstractions, inspired, in part, by nature seen or imagined, filtered through the prism of the artist's emotional landscape. This exhibition at Susan Eley Fine Art is Reshef's first showing in the U.S.

Painter Liane Ricci relocated from Brooklyn, NY to Culver City, CA two years ago. She has studied at the Art Students League, the School of Visual Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology, NY, and at the Hartford Art School in West Hartford, CT. Her series, "I Statements," ten oil paintings on paper, was commissioned by Susan Eley Fine Art for its inaugural exhibition. Fascinated by the subconscious, she uses painting as a tool toward understanding of self. She begins each painting with only the task of covering the space with a ground layer of color. Lights and darks inevitably appear, creating the composition of the under-painting. The rest of the process is a reaction to that first layer. As an "image" is created, she focuses on the specific thoughts and emotions that come to the surface. Through the painting, the imagery and concept grow together.

Susan Eley Fine Art was founded in the spring of 2006 by Susan Eisner Eley as a salon-style gallery, evocative of the literary gatherings and informal art showings in Paris in the 1920's. Situated on two floors of her home - a Manhattan Upper West Side Townhouse - the Gallery offers an intimate viewing experience, contrary to the more formal presentations of art in typical white box galleries.

Susan Eley Fine Art
46 WEST 90th STREET #1
NEW YORK, NY 10024
917-952-7641
www.susaneleyfineart.com

This release was published on openPR.